By Shelley Rotner
A first feelings book made of real photographs of children's faces, one clear emotion at a time, so a two-year-old can point and name it.
There's almost no story here and almost no text. Each page is a big color photograph of a real child's face doing one feeling — a wide-open grin for happy, a droopy mouth for sad, a scrunched glare for mad, huge round eyes for scared — usually with just that one word beside it. The faces belong to a real mix of children, different skin tones and hair, so your child keeps landing on one that looks a little like them. That's the whole book: a face, a word, the next face.
A photo of a real face does something a cartoon can't: your child sees the actual eyebrows and mouth of a real feeling, the same muscles they'd use on their own face. For a two- or three-year-old that's a short hop from the picture to "oh, that's me when I'm mad." It barely uses words, so a child who can't yet sit through a story still gets all the way through, and a child learning English gets the word and the face at the same time. For the very youngest, I'd reach for this before any of the wordier feelings books.